Comment Re:Robots 1, Humans 0 (Score 1) 258
Good luck...
Comment Re:Microsoft is responsible (Score 1) 258
Read the license.
Comment Re:"illegally" launching? (Score 0, Troll) 258
Perhaps its time to just firewall off Eastern Europe, Russia, and China and call it a day. Whitelist them when needed.
and send nukes, just to be sure... Yeah, like you Americans don't have spammers, malware creators and hackers... wake up! East isn't responsible for _your_ _American_ corporations with they cheese like crippleware. Firewall yourself from the internet, cut the cable, you'll be 100% sure! Windows was never ready for the internet anyway...
Comment Re:"illegally" launching? (Score 1) 258
Someone had to say that. Mod parent up!
Author's Guild Says Kindle's Text-To-Speech Software Illegal 683
Mike writes "The Author's Guild claims that the new Kindle's text-to-speech software is illegal, stating that 'They don't have the right to read a book out loud,' said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. 'That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.' Forget for a moment that text-to-speech doesn't copy an existing work. And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading. The Guild's claim is that even to read out loud is a production akin to an illegal copy, or a public performance."
False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself 513
An anonymous reader writes "Germany has a new minister of economic affairs. Mr. von und zu Guttenberg is descended from an old and noble lineage, so his official name is very long: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. When first there were rumors that he would be appointed to the post, someone changed his Wikipedia entry and added the name 'Wilhelm,' so Wikipedia stated his full name as: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. What resulted from this edit points up a big problem for our information society (in German; Google translation). The German and international press picked up the wrong name from Wikipedia — including well-known newspapers, Internet sites, and TV news such as spiegel.de, Bild, heute.de, TAZ, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the meantime, the change on Wikipedia was reverted, with a request for proof of the name. The proof was quickly found. On spiegel.de an article cites Mr. von und zu Guttenberg using his 'full name'; however, while the quote might have been real, the full name seems to have been looked up on Wikipedia while the false edit was in place. So the circle was closed: Wikipedia states a false fact, a reputable media outlet copies the false fact, and this outlet is then used as the source to prove the false fact to Wikipedia."
Submission + - Intel to Launch 32-Nanometer CPUs by September (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has announced that it's bringing its 32-nanometer architecture CPUs, codenamed Westmere, to market by September of this year. This tops industry expectations that the computing giant wouldn't launch a new iteration of its Nehalem chipset until 2010. Does this signal the end days for beleaguered chip manufacturer AMD, who's been busy with new sockets and stripped-down, tri-core verisons of its just-released 45nm Phenom II processors?
Submission + - iResQ (iPhone repair): No refund if you bitch (boingboing.net)
chimpo13 writes: "As BoingBoing points out iPhone repair company iResQ: No bad-service refund unless you delete blog posts complaining about the bad service. Apple's authorized iPhone repair service, iResQ, advertises same-day repair and overnight shipping. When Lindsay's iPhone screen shattered, she sent the phone to iResQ, and two weeks later it still hadn't been fixed. After she emailed to complain and posted the email to her (lightly trafficked) blog, iResQ agreed to eat the expedited shipping charge and part of the bill. However, now they're threatening to "rescind the refunds" unless Lindsay takes the blog post down."
Submission + - Social web sites sign EU pact vs. "cyber-bully (reuters.com)
Teferison writes: After the famous case of Megan Meier the European Commission has appealed to 17 social networking sites (Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Giovani.it, Google/YouTube, Hyves, Netlog, Nasza-klaza.pl, One.lt, Skyrock, StudiVZ, Sulake/Habbo Hotel, Yahoo!Europe, and Zap.lu) to sign a voluntary agreement order to protect under-18s. This agreement includes:
- Ensure that private profiles of users under the age of 18 are not searchable on the websites or search engines.
- Provide an easy to use and accessible "report abuse" software button, allowing users to report inappropriate contact from or conduct by another user with one click.
- Make sure that the full online profiles and contact lists of website users who are registered as under-18s are set to "private" by default, making it harder for people with bad intentions to get in touch with young people.
Submission + - Vim 7.2 released (sourceforge.net) 2
sanguisdex writes: After fifteen months of work: a brand new Vim release! This is a stable version. There are many bug fixes and updated runtime files. The only new feature worth mentioning is support for floating point. Upgrading from a previous version is highly recommended: a few crashing bugs and several security issues were fixed. For the details see the announcement
Submission + - ATM rip-off nets $9M in 30 minutes and here's how (networkworld.com)
Julie188 writes: "With only 100 compromised ATM cards thieves were able to grab $9 million bucks from the banking system in a new style of attack. How did the hackers steal $9 million in one 30-minute time period using only 100 ATM cards you ask? That shouldn't be possible given the daily limits (usually about $500/day) placed on all ATM cards. Well it turns out that the hackers applied military like precision to old ATM Scam techniques and added a touch of devious ingenuity to pull this one off."
Submission + - Opera Speeds Up Javascript (geek.com)
riegel writes: "geek.com has a story about Operas new javascript engine
From the Article...
The new engine is called Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) and sees Opera refocus on performance. In recent releases the emphasis has been on ensuring the browser uses as few resources, memory, and hard drive space as possible, but now execution speed is seen as key."
From the Article...
The new engine is called Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) and sees Opera refocus on performance. In recent releases the emphasis has been on ensuring the browser uses as few resources, memory, and hard drive space as possible, but now execution speed is seen as key."
Submission + - Via Nano spanks Intel Atom in netbook benchmarks (zdnet.co.uk)
Glib Piglet writes: "ZDNet UK has a whole set of benchmarks comparing a 1.8 GHz Nano in VIA's Epia SN motherboard and a 1.6 GHz Atom in Intel's 'Little Falls' D945GCFL mobo. It's not good news for Chipzilla. With phrases like "As far as memory performance is concerned, the Nano is clearly superior in every test" and "The VIA Nano emerges as the better processor for internet tasks. While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.", there's little to write home about. The Nano even outperforms Nehalem on one test. It's not all win for Via, though. The benchmark concludes that in some ways, all netbooks remain in the IT stone ages."
Submission + - Obama Asks For Review Of Online Security (washingtonpost.com)
Presto Vivace writes: "
President Obama yesterday ordered a 60-day review of the nation's cybersecurity to examine how federal agencies use technology to protect secrets and data. Former Bush administration aide Melissa Hathaway will head the effort to examine all the government plans, programs and activities underway to manage large amounts of data — including passport applications, tax records, personal tax returns and national security documents. A failure or attack on that infrastructure could harm the country by, for example, shutting down the nation's airlines or shutting down the stock market.
What do Slashdotters think should be done?"
Submission + - Fedora as Basis of Russia's Operating System? (blogspot.com)
Glyn Moody writes: "Last month, a story about Russia producing its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux started circulating. Now there's some confirmation, and details of how the plan might be put into practice. Red Hat had a meeting with the Russian communications ministry, which announced that the development of free software in Russia was one of its priorities. One concrete idea they talked about was using the Russian Fedora project as a step towards creating a national operating system."
